Plantation forestry in the Southeast Asian region dates back to the 19th century (de Jong et al.
2003). Although the planting of forest species in Malaysia has been recorded as early as 1880 (FAO 2002), the establishment of large scale exotic timber plantations did not begin in earnest until the mid-1970s (Tsai 1988). One of the first examples from Eastern Malaysia was that of Sabah Softwoods Sdn Bhd in the 1980s; a joint venture between the Sabah Foundation and a large international timber company (Stuebing 2005). However prior to the introduction of rubber in 1905, previous attempts at plantation agriculture in Sarawak, including tea, coffee, tobacco, and sugar cane had met with failure (Aiken and Leigh 1995).
In Sarawak, experimental trials of species with agroforestry potential were conducted early last century to provide a solution to the large areas of forest land that had become degraded through the practice of shifting cultivation. However no major plantings were carried out until 1965, with the initiation of the ‘Reforestation Research Programme’. (FAO 2002). Land development programs in Sarawak have historically targeted ‘idle’ land by promoting the conversion of NCR land to oil palm plantation (Figure 1.11) under joint venture schemes; thus promoting Dayak into mainstream economic development. Such schemes may typically involve a 60% share retained by the company, 30% by the local community(s), while the government acts as a trustee enjoying a 10% share (Cooke 2006). The Sarawak State Government has a target of one million hectares of oil palm plantation in Sarawak by 2010, of which at least 400,000 ha are to be converted from NCR land (Cook 2006).
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Figure 1.11: Large scale industrial oil palm plantation estate, Sarawak, East Malaysia (Photograph A. Shadbolt, 2008).
The first Acacia mangium; a tropical tree species capable of colonising difficult sites, was introduced to Sabah in 1966 (Awang and Taylor 1993) as a fire break around Eucalyptus deglupta and Gmelina arborea trees, both of which the acacia out-performed (Pinyopusarerk et al. 1993). By the 1980’s acacia was being planted on a large scale in both Sabah and Peninsula Malaysia (Wong et al. 1998) as the principal species identified for the production of pulp; the planting material of other species proving difficult to procure (FAO 2002).
Where the planting of industrial timber plantations is carried out on alang-alang (Imperata cylinerica) grasslands or degraded scrub areas, their establishment can be viewed as a form of re-forestation. However in both Sarawak and Kalimantan alike, often productive forest is cleared to make way for these plantations (Potter 2003) (Photograph 1.12). Therefore the encouragement of tropical plantations carries a significant risk that natural forests will be cleared to facilitate their
Page | 22 establishment; a loss of natural forest and associated biodiversity that may not be recognised by policy makers and/or other stakeholders (ITTO 2007). Indeed the recent interest in large scale estate crops like oil palm is resulting in the clearance of large tracts of rain forest (de Jong et al.
2003), and today plantation forestry is seen to be taking over much of the former naturally forested landscape of Borneo (Padoch and Peluso 2003), including the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah.
Figure 1.10: Clearance of secondary forest in Sarawak, East Malaysia, to make way for fast growing industrial timber plantation establishment (Photograph A. Shadbolt 2005).
As a result of logging, shifting cultivation, and conversion to other land uses worldwide, tropical rainforests are disappearing at a rate of 15 million hectares annually (Yamada 1997). The pressure on natural forests to provide timber products to consumers is so high, that many timber companies have converted these forests to managed fast growing timber plantations (Giman et al.
2007). Similarly, many countries of the Asia-Pacific region have since turned to plantation
Page | 23 forestry, in response to the diminishing harvesting capacities of their natural forests (Enters et al.
2004; Martana 2004; Potter 2003). At 113.2 million hectares, Enters et al. (2004) estimate forest plantations to make up or approximately 16 percent of the total forest cover in the Asia-Pacific region; a region accounting for around 61 percent of the worlds plantation forests.
By 1990 the hill forests of Sarawak were being harvested at a rate of 13 million m3 per annum, which if continued at such a rate it was estimated that this would have seen all primary forests available to timber concessions harvested by about 2001 with only cut-over forests remaining (Poore 2003). Also, at about that time, the ‘southern plantation countries’ of Australia, New Zealand, Chile and South Africa had begun to capture the market share of wood production from Indonesia and Malaysia who had both exploited their natural advantages throughout the 1970s and 1980s (Enters et al. 2004).
In Sarawak, Chan (1998) identified that investors with existing timber processing facilities were faced with the choice of either planting trees (i.e. plantation forestry) to ensure the supply of raw materials to their plants, or to gamble on the sustainable management of the States natural forests.
In 1996 the Sarawak Chief Minister Datuk Patinggi Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud stated, “The State has reached its peak in producing timber from natural forests and needed to find better ways to sustain timber resources,” and that “the State’s timber industry will be better off if it embarked on reforestation with fast growing species to supplement timber production” (Fong 1998).
With approximately 41% of Sarawak’s naturally forested land area (3.6 million ha) under Stateland Forests, and much of which was capable of being alienated for the production of cash crops (Appanah and Ali 1998), the late 1990s saw the State Government identify at least one
Page | 24 million hectares available for the establishment of plantation forestry, with the Chief Minister publicly announcing that the State should be planting a minimum of 20% of the Permanent Forest Estate (PFE) as tree plantations (Chan 1998). The Sarawak State Government accordingly made extensive changes to both the Land Code and the Forest Ordinance to allow over 600,000 hectares to be allocated to private plantation companies, and thus restricting customary rights to those lands (Cramb 2007).
The argument has often been put forward that plantation forestry could reduce pressure on natural forests (MacKinnon and Sumardja 2003; FAO 2002; Barber 1998; Ellis 2007); a resource from which the supply of industrial timber predicted to decline in the medium term (Tomaselli 2007). Consequently, with the suggestion that raw material supply to wood based Malaysian industries may soon be derived from the plantation sector (Woon and Norini, 2002), coupled with an increasing demand for wood fibre (Chan, Kho and Lee 1998), particularly in the Chinese and South Korean paper industry (Chemsain Konsultant Sdn. Bhd 2006), planted forests in Sarawak and Sabah are now a major feature of the landscape. As part of this paradigm shift, the Sarawak Forest Department has established a fast growing A. mangium plantation in a specially designated 504,000 hectare Planted Forest Zone (PFZ) (Figure 1.13) in the Bintulu Division of the State (Stuebing 2005).
Towards the latter half of last century the forests of the PFZ were regarded as one of the largest remaining single areas of uncommitted high quality and commercially valuable hardwood forests in the world (See FAO 1972; FAO 1973; FAO 1974). Harvesting of these forests began in the early 1970’s (Stuebing 2007), and repeated selective harvesting of commercial timber species resulted in a heavily degraded and simplified forest structure with a comparatively low canopy and few emergent trees compared to primary forest. Furthermore, although local indigenous
Page | 25 peoples have practiced shifting cultivation along the main river systems and their tributaries for perhaps hundreds of years, the ingress of new forest road networks allowed shifting cultivators increased access to previously inaccessible forests. This practice of shifting cultivation has also contributed to a mosaic of various aged disturbance patches across the PFZ landscape, adding to the heterogeneity and fragmentation of the natural forest over a range of spatial scales.
Figure 1.13: Location of Planted Forest Zone (PFZ) in the state of Sarawak, East Malaysia (Source Hall, Undated).
Governments are increasingly handing over rights to forest utilisation along with forest management responsibilities to private operators (Landell-Mills and Ford 1999). In the case of the Planted Forests project in Sarawak however, the project is 100% government funded (Ellis 2007), and the State government has contracted Grand Perfect Sdn. Bhd. (GP); a consortium of
Page | 26 three local timber companies as the primary contractor tasked with the establishment of a the specially designated 504,000 hectare Planted Forest Zone (Stuebing 2005) discussed above. In 2006, the planting of acacia across the PFZ was progressing at a rate of 24,000 ha per annum (Chemsain Konsultant Sdn. Bhd 2006), with the plantation nursery (Figure 1.14) capable of producing approximately three million acacia seedlings per month (Ellis 2007). The pulp produced from the PFZ, at a projected rate of 750,000 tonnes per annum, is expected to cater for both domestic and international needs and is intended to capitalize on the lucrative pulp and paper industry (Chemsain Konsultant Sdn. Bhd 2006). However to put this in context, despite the large scale of such a project, 500,000 ha of acacia would satisfy just 15% of Japans demand for hardwood chips; a demand which is only expected to increase (Glyn 1998).
Figure 1.11: Acacia mangium seedling production at the Samarakan Nursery, Planted Forest Zone, Sarawak, East Malaysia. The Samarakan Nursery has capacity to produce 3,000,000 seedlings per month (Photograph A. Shadbolt, 2010).
Page | 27 Meanwhile industries in Kalimantan are also looking to gain a market share in the plantation industry (Potter 2003). In the 1990s the Indonesian government pushed for the establishment of industrial tree plantations in Kalimantan (Colfer and Soedjito 2003; Potter 2003), and Pirard and Cossalter (2006) report applications to build pulp mills in South Kalimantan (600,000 tonne) and Central Kalimantan (250,000 tonne) (Pirard and Cossalter 2006), indicating that the promotion of these plantation areas will be a major feature of the countries forest policies in the near future (Mayer 2003). By 2003, over one million hectares had been allocated for timber plantations in West Kalimantan (Peters 2003). Across the whole of Indonesia, pulpwood plantations account for 42% of the total 2.9 million hectares of established plantation area, and at 68% also dominates the total area ‘allocated’ to plantations (5.04 million hectares) (Martana 2004).
While it is planned that acacia grown for the supply of pulp will be grown on a rotation of seven to eight years (Figure 1.15), Barber (1988) predicts that lengthening the growing cycle to 12 years not only significantly increases the production of commercial grade wood, but may also substitute the need to harvest from natural hardwood forests. However based on projections from East Kalimantan, Potter (2003) suggests that just two rotations of a fast growing timber species like A. mangium is likely to exhaust the poor soils, and have adverse effects on water-flow and soil erosion (MacKinnon and Sumardja 2003).
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Figure 1.125: Author with eight year old Acacia mangium logs harvested from the Planted Forest Zone, Sarawak, East Malaysia. (Photograph J. Unggang, 2010).